PMS induced font frustration

by Chronically Creative - Saturday, November 16, 2013

Chronically Creative has had a little makeover!

I've been having bloggy font problems for a while now. You may have noticed the giant gaps that have randomly been appearing between some words. Well, I sure have and it has been sending me batty. For some reason, whenever I set my paragraph alignment to 'justify', it sends the text into a tizzy and it doesn't know how to behave. So it chucks a wobbly, creating gaps that look ridiculous. I cringe whenever I look at a published post because it looks like I've gone mad with the space bar, when really it's not me at all, it's a problem with the font.

I had a play around with the different fonts and sizes available on the Blogger platform (which is why there are so many posts on this blog where the text is different) and have discovered that it happens with every single font and alignment. Sigh. However, I found that I can make it less obvious using the left and center alignments, but this makes paragraphs look messy and out of whack, which hurts my blogging OCD. Whenever I edit a post to publish I have to spend quite a lot of time trying to fix the damn font. Ain't nobody got spoons for that!

I don't remember having this much font trouble on the previous templates I have used for this blog, so I figured it must have been the template I was using.

While struggling with bad PMS (again) the other week, I could no longer grin and bear the font issues like I had for so long. This time, instead of turning into a screaming psychopathic bitch, I became depressed and took my frustration out on my blog. This has happened before.

PMS exacerbated my font frustration and I became quite upset about it. Sitting in front of my computer screen I had a little cry about it. All of a sudden I hated how my blog looked. I CRIED ABOUT FONT.

I had to give myself a pep talk: "For goodness sakes, Emily. There are people dying in the world and you're upset about font. People aren't coming to this blog to see perfect font, they're coming here for the content."

Out of pure frustration and PMS rage I went on the hunt for a better blog template. At first I tried many simple templates with black text headers and white backgrounds for something different, but nothing worked. Most of the templates that I tried and liked didn't have a horizontal pages bar - something I can't do without.

I also couldn't bear to part with the banner I created to match my previous templates which gives people a little glimpse into what this blog is all about. Finding the right colours to match the banner while finding a free template that I actually liked was a challenge. It was just as frustrating as my font situation. I went through trialing 30 different templates that I thought had potential out of the thousands of free dowloadable ones out there.

Just as I was about to give up, pick myself back up and suck it up, I came across the lovely Pink Frilly Knickers template by Blogger Candy. And it matches perfectly with this blog. Pink, frilly and pretty - me to a tee. I was planning on trying to move away from the pink, but nothing else looked or felt right, so I think the pink is here to stay...for now. Although this template and design isn't exactly what I had in mind for what I want for this blog in the future, it's kind of close, so it will do for now (I am too much of a tight arse to pay a designer to do it for me right now, haha).

I'm falling in love with the title font and super cute polka dots

In my humble opinion, the free blogger templates that Blogger Candy offers are the best I've seen (I don't think you can do better for free). Fabulous and super cute designs that are well worth taking a look at if you are using the Blogger platform and are on the hunt for a brand new template.

Has this new template helped get me out of my font funk? Kind of... as I said before, I thought that the font issues may have been caused by the template I was using. Well it was only when I switched the blog over that I realised Blogger is actually to blame. Upon doing some research I discovered that other blogs using Blogger had obvious text space issues too (it's sure nice to know I'm not alone in my frustration). So the issue can't be fixed, well not by me anyway, because it's a fault at Blogger's end. Ugh.

The old template

However, this new template does have much better font than the last one I was using and it does help make those pesky gaps a little less obvious. It also publishes text using the left alignment waaaay better. Happy times! All is right with the world again.

Okay, that's enough about font. Onto more creative things...